Russ Allbery wrote: > Oh, you're concerned with what upstream tarballs Debian can consume > without repackaging. > > I don't see any reason why this should prevent GCC from releasing tarballs > compressed with lzip if they want to. They certainly wouldn't stop > releasing tarballs in other formats, for a host of reasons, and Debian can > just use one of the other formats. > > In other words, this is a "fake" dependency; there is nothing about > Debian's tools or formats that prevents GCC from releasing tarballs with > lzip.
Thanks for the explanation. When I saw in the gcc thread that there's only one distribution not supporting lzip, I wanted to know more. Now, thanks to your explanations, I know more about this topic. > Debian is the last project that you should wait for to make a decision > like this. We're very unlikely to adopt lzip as a native upstream tarball > format until it is in very widespread use elsewhere. (That's the pattern > followed with previous formats except for lzma, and I think our somewhat > premature adoption of lzma support is now seen as a mistake we shouldn't > repeat.) We are *extremely* conservative about source package formats > because, once we adopt one, we have to support it for nearly forever; > phasing one out again is quite difficult. I think lzip is presently quite (maybe not “very”) wide spread. I wish that when the moment lzip has enough use comes, you will make a decision and will support lzip. Thanks for all, Maria Bisen
